PRISMATIC TRANSLATIONAnnual workshop of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory

University of Vienna

25–26 July 2016 (tbc)

Organised by: Sowon S Park, Oxford University

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Walid Hamarneh, Sowon S Park, Matthew Reynolds, Stefan Willer

Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a

text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening

of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime

of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the

technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political and

legal contexts. The second view attaches to contexts where several spoken languages share

the same written characters (as in the Chinese scriptworld), to circumstances where language

is not standardised (e.g., minority & dialectal communities & oral cultures), to the fluidity of

electronic text, and to literature, especially poetry and theatrical performance. The first view

sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism.

The prismatic view of translation has yet to be fully theorised. For instance, a historical

and intercultural glimpse at translation practices reveals a highly varied relationship between

‘original’ and ‘copy’ that demands further examination. Papers of the 2016 committee

meeting could study the pragmatic requirements of translations (e.g., the function of dominant

languages, the precarious prestige of specialised vernaculars, shifts in audiences, the situated

behavior of authors), their concrete realisation in the individual transformation of documents

(i.e., in multilingual groups of texts consisting of originals and translations), and their impact

on the history of language and literature.

This approach would develop the line taken in the key recent intervention in the study

of translations, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : dictionnaire des intraduisibles by

Cassin et al., itself translated as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.

Despite its catchy subtitle or title, the volume in fact tends to deconstruct the binary

translatable / untranslatable, revealing instead what Benjamin called ‘Ubersetzung bis zu

einem gewissen Grade’ (‘the translatable to some degree’). Such degrees of translation require

standard ideas such as ‘equivalence’, ‘fidelity’, and the binary of ‘foreignising’ and

‘domesticating’ to be rethought. Attention to non-European languages and translation

traditions is likely to be crucial to this endeavour.

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PROGRAMME

Monday 25th July

9am Introduction (Sowon Park)

A 9.03 – 10.30 (Chair: Walid Hamarneh)

Matthew Reynolds, ‘Variorum Translations’

Robert J. C. Young, ‘Translation through the Lens of Language’

Sowon Park, ‘Ideographic Translation’

B 11 – 12.30 (Chair: Stefan Willer)

Yvonne Howell, ‘Translating Happiness’

Walid Hamarneh, ‘Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning Value’

Michel Chaouli, ‘Translation, Interpretation, Orientation’

Lunch

C2 – 3.30 Invited Guest Speaker, Francesca Orsini, SOAS (Chair: Robert J. C. Young)

‘Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence: Poetic Idioms in a

Multilingual Literary Culture’

D 4 – 5.30 (Chair: Eva Horn)

Kyohei Norimitsu, ‘From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of

Translation’

Vladimir Biti, ‘What Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as a Political

Operation’

Jernej Habjan, ‘Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic Translation’

7 – late. Conference Dinner

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Tuesday 26th July

E 9 – 10.30 (Chair: Vladimir Biti)

Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical Projects’

Robert Stockhammer, ‘The (Un-)translatability of Welt’

Rahilya Geybullayeva, ‘Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary

Terms’

F 11 – 12.30 (Chair: Robert Stockhammer)

Hitoshi Oshima, ‘Prismatic Effects Made by Translations of Haiku’

Péter Hajdu, ‘The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ Satyricon’

Stefan Willer, ‘“Originalmäßig”: Goethe/Retranslation/Diderot’

Lunch

G 2 – 3.30

Discussion led by Matthew Reynolds

F 4 – 7. Business Meeting

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ABSTRACTS

What Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as Political Operation

Vladimir Biti, University of Vienna

As if by definition, translation lays claim to continuity, refusing to accept any substantial

break between its states of departure and arrival. The latter declares fidelity to the former,

suppressing the betrayal which is being committed. The same repudiation characterises the

operation of translatio imperii carried out along an irreversible historical axis, even if it

transfigures political rather than linguistic states into one another. Inasmuch as the asymmetry

between the internal structures of these states underlies the same denial in both translatio and

translation, the analogy between the political kernels of these two seemingly fully

heterogeneous transitions appears to be illuminating. Although their states of departure and

arrival are both discontinuous and dislocated with regard to one another, the successor erases

this an-archic and ec-static relation with the model. It refuses to acknowledge the latter

because this peculiar conjoining disjuncture would prevent both its complete melting into and

its clear separation from the model. In such manner, neither of the paths to the successor’s

sovereignty would be available. The successor can only legitimate its claim to inheritance if

the sovereignty of both relates is guaranteed.

Interpreting translatio(n) as the successor’s self-asserting reaction to the ‘spectral’

address of the model, I, on the contrary, intend to question both the model’s and the

successor’s sovereignty. The model, inasmuch as the successor’s unequal constituencies

experience it, turns out to be a conflict-ridden constellation rather than sovereign. However, if

the successor’s constituencies cannot respond to the model’s uncertain address without

competing with other internal constituencies, their sovereignty is equally questionable. It is

precisely translatio(n) as a camouflaged self-establishment which the successor’s constituency

needs to become sovereign. What dismantles translatio(n) as a sovereignty-warranting

undertaking at the expense of others, is that it only promotes the constituency that authors it to

the status of agency, while relegating other constituencies to the status of its enablers. This

constitutive bifurcation points to an apocryphal untranslated residue amid the publicly

translated state, uncovering the possibility of different translatio(n)s. Leaving this residue

untranslated means sentencing it to a state of anonymity. Liberating its suppressed zone of

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potentiality means retranslating the official outcome of translatio(n). This is why I argue for

understanding translatio(n) as a stubbornly recommencing politics instead of taking it for

granted as the state that covers its policing.

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Translation, Interpretation, Orientation

Michel Chaouli, Indiana University

‘“Interpretation”,’ Harold Bloom writes at one point, ‘once meant “translation,” and

essentially still does’ (A Map of Misreading, 1980, 85). If his proposition has merit, then it

encourages us to think of translation on a scale of complexity that we ordinarily reserve for

the idea and practice of interpretation. But do we know how to think of interpretation? How

might we conceive of this idea so that it is apt to enrich, rather than diminish, the notion of

translation?

The most entrenched notion of interpretation, developed in ancient times as part of the

practice of turning religious and legal codes into canonical texts, relies on a semantic model

that is essentially substitutive: the interpretation comes to take the place of the religious or

legal text. We often think of interpretation as being parasitic on the text to be interpreted, but

in this classical model, the interpretation stands in for the law, in effect becoming the law. If

we follow this model, translation will look like a process of substituting one set of words (in

one language) for another set of words (in another).

Yet there are other models of interpretation that we might use as our point of departure.

What if we thought of interpretation not as a way of substituting one set of meaningful signs

for another, but as a mode of comportment? It would be a way of knowing what I must do in a

certain situation (rather than figuring out what someone else is saying). Using Wittgenstein’s

language (without taking on all of his philosophical baggage), we might say that interpretation

would involve ‘knowing what to do next’, moving about a new world, learning to orient

oneself in it. Depending on the signs I set out to interpret and depending on my mood, the

ways I orient myself may be narrow or they may leave great latitude, but they would have to

be understood as being constrained, for without constraints the notion of learning to orient

oneself in a world would have little sense. In my talk, I hope to develop the idea of

interpretation as a form of orientation and what promise it might hold for the notion of

translation.

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Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary Terms

Rahilya Geybullayeva. Baku Slavic University

Words, like peoples, travel their own evolutionary path, which can be retraced in one way or

another. Like families and tribes, the words crossbreed in fresh soil with other interpretations,

acquiring new shades of meaning. These shades then spill out into new words which, at first

glance, have nothing in common with the previous meaning of their progenitor; for example,

the lexical series – semeni-sema-semela-zemlya – where each word appears to be original.

Interpreting individual words in translation without any knowledge of their

culturological context leads to contradictions. For example, how should we understand the

ban on wine in the Holy Scriptures (sherab) and the praise of wine (sherab) in classical

Islamic poetry of the same era? How did wine come to be divided into both drink and symbol

in one and the same culture and historical period? Why do the Azerbaijani and Turkish

languages have two words to mean the same drink wine (the semiotics of the word Russian

vino [вино – wine] go back to the semiotics of the word of the same root vina [вина – sin]):

sherab and chakhir, which are different from one another in terms of their lexical roots?

Searches for an answer to these questions lead to the distant past (relatively) of the primary

semiotics of sacred drinks, which through interpretation and translation enter different

cultures in new semiotic dimensions.

In this work we suggest retracing the path of several literary terms of Azerbaijani and

Turkish literature studies such as ədəbiyyat, tarikat, kitab, namə, xəmsə and also figures and

images such as aşuq, ozan, Dədə, məcnun, saqi and şərab which are not mentioned (as well as

other appropriate terms from other eastern cultures) in the Western textbooks and in Oxford

Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick. They are traditionally considered to have been

borrowed from classical Islamic poetry in the Middle Ages by peoples newly converted to

Islam. To restore their contemporary interpretation the medieval period is accepted as their

point of origin. Although the question of the beginning of (primary) meaning, of the starting

point or origin, is relative, like the beginning of national literature and culture of a nation or

people. Parallels with, and divergences from, earlier cultures, cultures that are geographically

close and not so close, can be found in these literary terms. They existed in the pre-Islamic

period in other neighbouring cultures. Study of this path allows cultural matrix to be

determined which reveal common names for different phenomena, different names for

common phenomena or elements of so-called prismatic translation.

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Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic Translation

Jernej Habjan, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

In political terms, the transition from translation as channelling of equivalences to translation

as refraction of differences can be viewed as part of the shift from consensual translation to

cultural translation. Arguing for consensual translation, Jürgen Habermas speaks of a process

of returning excluded individuals into the community by translating their pathological private

languages into public communication. On the other side, Homi Bhabha’s and Judith Butler’s

cultural translation is a process of universalising the very sphere of public communication by

making it recognise its excluded other. Both Butler and Bhabha have convincingly criticised

Habermas’s therapeutic essentialism, which shares much of its flaws with the channelising

translation as compared to prismatic translation. Like channelising translation, Habermas’s

universal pragmatics subsumes otherness under equivalence, and only Butler’s and Bhabha’s

proposals of cultural translation grant otherness the status of difference. However, according

to the Viennese collective eipcp, and notably Boris Buden, Butler’s and Bhabha’s models of

translation are prone as much as Habermas’s to the post-political ideology of balancing the

impossibilities instead of facing the impossibility of balancing. In my paper, I will focus on

Butler’s proposal of cultural translation as an endless process of translating identities

excluded from the legal notion of universality back into this notion, which is thereby itself

retroactively universalised. I will argue that Butler’s proposal rests on a misreading of

(Derrida’s misreading of) Austin’s speech act theory, and try to show how such a reification

of performativity could be avoided in the shift from channelising translation to prismatic

translation.

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The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ Satyricon

Péter Hajdu, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

I would like to test the metaphor of translation as prism in the Hungarian translations of

Petronius. It is always a challenge to translate Latin texts into non-Indo-European languages,

which have completely different structure, and very probably different ideas about artistic

merits of a text. The situation is especially delicate with Petronius for two reasons. On the one

hand, the text does not everywhere fit in with the traditional standards of Latin, which is

taught in schools and for which a canon of translation strategies have been developed. On the

other, Petronius' work started being regarded as a novel in the 20th century, which solicited

translators use free, creative strategies to apply the text to the expectations of novel readers.

There are three Hungarian translation sf the work. István Székely (1910) and József Révay

(1920) translated only the single long continuous fragment, Trimalchio's dinner, then István

Károly Horváth (1963) all the available fragments. All the three translators can be regarded as

professionals, since they translated a lot. Székely was a secondary school teacher, who

translated several books from German and some from Latin. He produced the most innovative

prose translation from Latin in his age. Interestingly enough he regarded the literary piece a

xenophobic fable. Révay in that period of his life was a freelance translator and writer. He

was not allowed to teach between 1920–45, so he translated from Latin, Greek, Italian and

French, and wrote several informative books on ancient cultural history, but also a lot

historical fiction. He rather standardised the Hungarian Petronius. Horváth was a university

teacher and a talented scholar, who loved to do research in texts that he regarded as examples

of ancient popular realism. His Petronius is a realist writer. These three translations offer three

rather different images of the Satyricon.

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Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning Value

Walid Hamarneh, University of Richmond

During the past two decades scholars have been engaged in studying the role of translation in

the different and diverse processes that helped universalise the western ‘modern’ and its

spread in different societies and cultures especially during the historical moments of

colonialism and globalisation. These two historical moments, highly controversial and

difficult to disengage temporally, have been moments of interaction and strife, contact and

confrontation, encountering and countering, sharing and separation, or at least attempts at all

that. The, by now accepted, central role that translation played in these complex processes has

been difficult to theorise due to the different historical conditions and cases that were studied.

Most theoretical pronouncements depended on particular cases or cases from contiguous

areas.

The global circulation of signs and the ways their meaning values are made and unmade

problematise further the issues of equivalence and reciprocity of meaning that have been

central to theories of translation. This is especially the case when we are confronted with

cases where reciprocity becomes a problem in trans-lingual and trans-cultural exchanges

where predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterise the material and

intellectual conditions of that exchange. Such en-counters become more interesting when they

are performed with the pretext of ‘authenticity’ envisioned under these conditions of unequal

exchange.

To examine some theoretical aspects of such processes, I have chosen two cases, one

from Egypt (Mujstafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti 1876–1924) and one from China (Lin Shu 1852–

1924). The two were contemporaries who had no or little command of any foreign language

and were proponents of the resuscitation of classical modes of literary discourse. Yet both

worked mostly in ‘translation’. They translated works from the western cannon, especially

novels, and from languages they did not know. However, their ‘translations’ were very

popular to the extent that they became a part of the canon in their respective cultures.

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Translating Happiness

Yvonne Howell, University of Richmond

It has long been noted that words for ‘happiness’ (Freude, Glücklichkeit, schastie, radost,

bonheur, raha, etc.) do not translate seamlessly across even closely related languages. The

etymological roots of words that designate happiness – presumably a highly subjective state

that is, nevertheless, a universal human capacity – point to intriguingly different cultural and

philosophical notions of what ‘happiness’ entails. This paper will examine recent attempts to

theorise cross-cultural notions of ‘happiness’ and look more closely at the words used to

designate (and translate) the concept in several different literary traditions.

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From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of Translation

Kyohei Norimatsu, University of Tokyo

Yuri Lotman (1922–93), the leading scholar of Soviet semiotics, in his later years focused his

attention on translation and dialogue between various semiotic systems. This enabled him to

escape the limitation of static description inherent in a given sign system and to describe and

clarify the dynamic process of production of new meanings. In this sense, his notion of

translation was highly prismatic. At the same time, Lotman developed the concept of the

‘semiosphere’, which embraces various semiotic systems and functions as the basis for

translation between them. This virtual space which precedes any semiotic systems and

supplies the precondition for prismatic translation, is reminiscent of the imperial space that

was the Soviet Union, uniting various nations and cultures. In the last few years of his life,

however, Lotman moved away from this ‘imperial’ view of translation, reconceptualising it as

‘explosion’; he now described the production of new meanings through translation as an

unpredictable event in time. Referring to other contemporary Russian cultural theories on

translation and dialogue, this paper examines the shift in Lotman’s view and thus explores

problematics of prismatic translation.

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Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence:

Poetic Idioms in a Multilingual Literary Culture

Francesca Orsini, University of London

One would expect that in a multilingual literary culture there would be a great many

translations – isn’t that one way newness enters a literature? But my experience with early

modern literary culture in north India is that formal translations were, in fact, remarkably few.

From what we can glean from the texts we have and the relatively few multilingual traces in

the mostly monolingual archives, the multiple poetic tastes and idioms that existed and were

cultivated did not travel through translation. How did they travel, then? Using examples from

courtly and devotional Persian, Hindi and Urdu texts, I will argue that either the differences

between the poetic idioms were stressed and these were consciously cultivated in parallel

from each other, or else it was poetic ideas, images and expressions – rather than whole texts

– which travelled from one language to the other. The result was either the setting up of poetic

equivalences (X image in Persian is equivalent to Y image in Hindi), the conscious mixing of

poetic images and key terms in a macheronic idiom, or language-stretching – the introduction

of new words or ideas or stretching old ones to new meanings. Another outcome was that

poets and audiences in the various languages became familiar with the different poetic idioms

and repertoires even in the absence of formal translations and of widespread literacy, given

the oral-performative contexts of much of this poetry. The Indian example, then, helps us

think about the ‘carrying over’ of poetic ideas and significant terms beyond formal

translation.

And while modern language ideologies taught people to believe that ‘Persian and Urdu

belong to Muslims’ and ‘Hindi is the language of the Hindus’, not just pragmatic language

use but also poetic tastes were and remained eclectic longer after those ideological

pronouncements.

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Prismatic Effects Made By Translations of Haiku

Hitoshi Oshima, Fukuoka University

‘Haiku’, a Japanese poetic genre, used to be a part of ‘renku’, chained short poems. Renku

was a game played by several poets, each one of whom composed a phrase to make a whole

following the principle of association of ideas and some established rules. What we call haiku

today was just one of the phrases that composed the whole. This fact is important when we

think of prismatic effects made by translation. For translation is interpretation and prismatic

effects are made when interpretations are superimposed with multiplicity. Each poet

participating in a collective game of renku interpreted the phrases composed by other

participants before creating a new one. It was like a creative translation. With the addition of

the new phrase, the whole was to gain another colour, another dimension.

The play called renku was born in the 17th century, but the spirit of the play was born

earlier with what was called ‘kagaku’, science of songs. The science developed a lot in the

12th and the 13th centuries; it was taught from generation to generation in order to keep the

tradition of poetry safe and sound. It taught not only the ancient songs considered ‘classics’

but also the totality of the existing interpretations of them. It was a whole of texts and

interpretations or better to say translations. Lerners of it surefly discovered a world of

prismatic effects.

As for the translation of haiku in other languages than Japanese, we can consider it as a

creation of a new dimension added to the world of Japanese traditional poetry. Many of the

translations are surely made without any reference to renku or kagaku, yet we can still

consider them as continuations of the whole collective play of making short poems. The

addition of the dimension increase prismatic effects, of course.

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Ideographic Translation

Sowon S Park, Oxford University

Writing systems are typically accepted as transparent tools for transcribing spoken languages.

This view is encouraged by phonetic alphabetic writing, whether that be Greek, Hebrew or

Roman, which encodes the sound of speech. Yet the relations between writing and speech are

complex. Speech is at times simply an intermediary between thought and writing; at times it is

the immediate manifestation of thought from which writing derives; at others, speech and

writing are quite separate. The relations between writing and speech are also as various as the

different script systems. Translating literature written in one script system to another might be

precisely where the variation would be most evident. Yet translation theories have been

notably uninterested in how script shapes meaning, focusing almost entirely on the differences

between spoken languages. This phonocentric approach to translation critically neglects the

gap between speech and writing, as if speaking and writing are more or less approximate. By

being unaware of the range of script systems and naturalising the specific convention that is

phonetic writing, we limit our perspective to this one kind of written language – ‘speech for

the eyes’ – instead of seeing the full spectrum. This paper examines writing from a more

visually inclined prism and brings into focus ‘ideographic’ translation, which bypasses sound

and operates directly from visual image to meaning.

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Variorum Translations

Matthew Reynolds, Oxford University

There are various partial and competing theoretical paradigms for thinking about multiple

translations. They can be seen in terms of ‘reception’, ie as manifestations of historical and

cultural difference; as indexes of period or personal styles; as eruptions of the signifying

potential of the source text. This paper will begin by reaching back to classic 1970s and 80s

work on texts and interpretation by Fish and de Man to ground a more comprehensive

theorisation in terms of an agonistic and yet generative relationship between the many and the

one.

Variorum editions display a range of variants as evidence for the selection of a ‘best

text’ while at the same time eroding confidence in that text by revealing the many different

choices that have been made in the past. Each branch of the paradox is reliant on the other: the

‘best text’ conjures into being a crowd of less good readings that it is being preferred to; while

the idea of the ‘variant’ assumes the existence of a unitary text that it varies from. In many

respects, the same tensions are generated by multiple translations.

The paper will go on to ask how much this state of affairs owes to a particular set of

institutional assumptions, the regime of standard languages and the technology of the book.

Here, it will draw on Matthiessen’s 2013 argument about the relevance to translation of

‘agnation’, ie the shadowing of texts by innumerable possible alternative expressions. It will

consider whether new ways of presenting prismatic translations, both in print and in electronic

media, might move on from the example of the variorum so as to nourish new reading

practices and point towards fresh ideas about textuality and meaning.

Other points of reference are likely to include multiple translations of Dante, Inferno 33

into English and of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre into French and Italian; Peter Robinson

Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible; new media artworks by John Cayley; the

2015 Prismatic Translation conference at OCCT (Oxford).

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Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical Projects

Monika Schmitz-Emans, Ruhr University Bochum

According to the linguist Mario Wandruszka (‘Interlinguistik’), we are multilingual within the

realms of our own language, using different languages corresponding to diverse practical

contexts of living. Languages are no monosystems, and thus there is only a relative difference

between the speaking of the different idioms any language is consisting of and real

multilingualism. Moreover, we never master our native language perfectly; it remains, at least

partially, a foreign language for us. – Examples of experimental poetic writing have been

interpreted as intralingual translation projects ponting to the relativity of this difference and

revealing strange and unexplored dimensions within the seemingly familiar everyday

language. Especially with regard to the French poet Michel Leiris, but also to Edmond Jabès

and Georges Perec, the writer and literary criticist Felix Philipp Ingold has stressed the

significance of what he (also) calls intra-lingual translation as a basic poetical strategy. To his

opinion, a closer and more systematical investigation on this topic would lead to important

discoveries concerning the theory of translation as well as of literature. Intralingual

translation, to Ingold’s opinion, is dominating large, though peripherical areas of poetical art,

including phenomena as anagrammatical texts, palindroms, phonetical readings, and other

kinds of experiments based the language- and letter-‘materials’.

In literature, the dictionary can be regarded as an important reflection model that points

to a fundamental self-referential interest of literary writing in the nature and the potentials of

language. It can firstly be modelled in its function as a device to foster communication and

understanding, even with regard to the world of nonverbal things. But it can secondly also be

viewed as a device of questionable value, as far as the ‘other’ in whatever respect is

concerned. Literary dictionaries of invented languages are paradoxical object reflecting the

borders of translation. Similarly, dictionaries containing unfamiliar words or proposing

deviant explications stimulate reflection both about language itself and about the tension

between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible.

From a comparative perspective, different poetical ‘Dictionaries’ shall be presented –

selected lyrical texts by the Austrian writer Ernst Jandl as well as by the Japanese (and also

German writing) poet Yoko Tawada (‘Ein Chinesisches Wörterbuch’; ‘A Chinese

Dictionary’). Michel Leiris’ text ‘Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses’ is already by its title and

structure quoting the concept translation. (Ingold has not only commented this linguistic-

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poetical experiment on the borderline between obvious and hidden ‘meanings’, but he has as

well translated the ‘Glossaire’ into a German version. It is obvious that there can’t be any

word-to-word-translation.) The strangeness of language in theses examples points to the

unknown potentials and possibilities of everyday language; poetical language may be

regarded as foreign language because it shows us the hidden reverse of familiar words and

expressions. It is the fictitious character of these translations which provides for their function

as a reflection model – they are meaningful not though, but because they are ‘false’.

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The (Un-)translatability of Welt

Robert Stockhammer, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

Paradoxically enough, there doesn’t exist a worldwide concept of world. Its translatability

cannot even be guaranteed with respect to the three official languages of the ICLA conference

in Vienna, 2016. Neither does the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des

intraduisibles contain an entry on monde, nor the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A

Philosophical Lexicon an entry on world – both of them confine themselves on near-

equivalent signifiers from other languages, olam (Hebrew), mir (Russian), and Welt

(German). Leaving, with regard to my competences, Hebrew and Russian aside, even the

equivalence of the English and German words, despite of their obvious etymological relation,

cannot be taken for granted. It seems that the German signifier implies a philosophical dignity

which is not always realised in the world wide web: ‘die Bezeichnung einer in sich sinnvoll

gegliederten Ganzheit, einer intern strukturierten Vielfalt’ (to quote the Historisches

Wörterbuch der Philosophie which heavily relies on the impressive entry on Welt in Grimm’s

Deutsches Wörterbuch). German is a language especially presumed to make sense (see also

Weltweisheit or Weltanschauung, composites without satisfactory equivalents in other

languages – but there are similar, albeit less acknowledged problems if Weltliteratur is hastily

translated as world literature). At the same time, however, the entries on Welt in Grimm’s

Wörterbuch and in the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles make it plausible that the German word

has, in its turn, developed its semantic abundance via the incorporation of related signifiers

from other languages (Kant’s use of the German word, for example, is explicitly influenced

by connotations of monde). In other words: At least some problems of (un-)translatability are

produced, not so much by linguistic or cultural uniqueness (by the Greek or the German way

of talking and thinking), but rather by prismatic refractions of earlier translations. Perhaps,

Welt has been always already translated. My contribution will try to test this hypothesis,

specifically via readings of the above mentioned dictionary entries as texts in their own right.

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‘Originalmäßig’: Goethe/Retranslation/Diderot

Stefan Willer, Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin

Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Le neveu de Rameau, written probably in the 1760s,

remained unpublished until the beginning of the 19th century. In 1804, a handwritten copy

was forwarded to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who almost immediately started to translate the

text. After this German version had been released in 1805, the French copy seems to have

disappeared. However, some fifteen years later, in 1821, Le neveu de Rameau was published

in the French edition of Diderot’s collected works – for which the editors, in lack of any copy

of the original text, had tacitly re-translated Goethe’s German version. (It was only in 1890

that a copy from Diderot’s own hand was discovered.) In my talk I will reconstruct the story

of this complex circulation of copies whithout originals. For this purpose, I will elaborate on

Goethe’s own account of the matter, which he published in 1824. This essay comprises

several (translated) documents of the case in question, e.g., a letter in which the French editor

praises the fidelity of Goethe’s translation by means of which Diderot’s work could be

restored ‘originalmäßig’ (= in the mode, shape, or measure of the original). This case story

can be regarded as an inquiry into the predicament, but also the potential, of prismatic

translation.

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Translation through the Lens of Language

Robert J. C. Young, New York University

While much attention has been directed towards the role of translation in its relation to the

range of differences between source and target languages, comparatively little thought is

given to its relation to the ways in which language itself is conceptualised in such

transactions. In this paper I shall argue that it makes little sense to conceptualise translation

without first asking ‘what is a language?’ Since this is quite possibly an unanswerable

question, this in turn causes difficulties for any concept of translation. What becomes clear is

that translation, in its modern understanding, is founded on a particular concept of language,

which is rarely articulated and when it is, can be seen to be profoundly problematic from a

conceptual and practical point of view. As a result, it might be said that far from mediating the

differences between languages, it is translation that produces them

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